Fr. Timothy Barkley
St. James Orthodox Church
(5/24) Jesus, who claimed to be the son of God, tortured to death as a heretic by the religious authorities and for treason by the civil authorities, was unaccountably not there on Sunday morning, when his friends went to grieve at his tomb. They said angels told them he was no longer dead, that he had come back to life, that divine power coursed
through his veins in unstoppable force restoring his body to life.
And then those friends – first the courageous women, then the more timid menfolk – saw him. They saw him, heard him, touched him, fed him … because they had trouble getting their heads around the fact that he was alive, he insisted on eating some fish and honey to prove he was real. They walked and talked with him, and their hearts burned within them.
They watched him ascend from the top of the Mount of Olives to heaven.
And they received divine power from him to share this with the whole world, that power personified in the Holy Spirit of God. Jesus had promised that the Holy Spirit would make the same divine power that flowed in him by nature invigorate them by the outpouring of the energies of God. They eagerly joined the fulness of their own love and life to this
gracious torrent of God’s life and love, and they were unstoppable. They changed the world.
And they too, when pressed to the point and forced to choose, preferred to be themselves tortured to death rather than turn away from the love of God. They knew that not even death could separate them from that primal love, because that timeless eros is the greatest force in the universe.
They knew that by opening and joining their body and soul to the operation of God’s energies their destiny was to become by that grace what Jesus was by his human-divine nature. They knew that it was within their grasp, by joining their love and life to the life and love of God, to partake of the divine nature and be filled with the fulness of God.
They left us a written record and a community of persons who give eternal witness to the power of the love and grace of God.
They were on fire to spread to the world the good news that God had become one of us, out of love for us and a desire to restore us to our rightful destiny as sharers in the divine nature. He could not bear to see – and they, on fire with his love, could not bear to see – humans suffering the consequences of turning away from that love.
Theirs is not a rational system of dry and musty theorems. They did not proclaim a system, but burned to introduce their brothers – everyone … for who, in this world, is not our brother – to the one they had touched and heard and smelt and followed. They knew that by knowing him and joining ourselves to him in worship, we leave behind a life of
futility and enter a life of love, in surrender to the love of God and receiving his good gifts. Because they were filled with his love that overflows to the entire world, they challenge us to open ourselves to that love and receive those gifts.
That love is available to us and those gifts are ours through the gracious condescension of God, who joined the second person of the trinitarian unity of the godhead to human nature and joyously filled our human nature with the divine nature, and who at the end of his time on earth took our human nature to heaven. He, in his human and divine nature,
now sits on a royal throne in heaven. Thus, we know that human nature is sacred, that human life is sacred, because, joined with the divine nature, it is enthroned in heaven as God.
And we know he still loves us, because that human-divine nature, the godman, still bears the marks of his torture and death. His hands show the print of the nails; in his side he carries the gash of the spear that pierced his heart for his love for us. He suffered these wounds for love. Even after being restored to life by divine power, he still
carries the marks of love. He will never forget; we must never forget.
In heaven, enthroned as God, he bears the marks of love.
Because he truly loves us, he gives us freedom to choose to receive his infinite love or reject it and substitute for it the petty baubles of this life. We have the ability to turn toward him, or away from him. If we turn away, if we refuse to open our heart to love, we cast a pall of darkness in which evil things are free to fester and grow. The
alternative to love and life is death, destruction and domination.
We have done wrongly – anyone doubting that need only look at our stewardship of the planet, at the way we treat those most vulnerable, at so many other things – to know that we have sought our own gratification in our own way rather than in humble openness to his love and his loving direction for our lives. In a word, we have sinned. That’s what
turning away from love means. And sin breeds evil.
Evil doesn’t always stay hidden in the shadows. Sometimes it breaks forth into our world, in little ways and in apparently unstoppable catastrophe, a breaching of the bounds of love by the evils we have allowed to breed and grow stronger, as we have preferred our own way over love.
We can ignore the scars on the good world God gave us, we can ignore the plight of our brothers and sisters who cry out for mercy, we can ignore the evils bred by our own sin, until suddenly the evil attains critical mass, so to speak, and explodes into our consciousness. Suddenly it’s not just "those people" who are suffering. Suddenly we are
suffering, and we cry out.
Could he just make it stop? If he is good and loving, certainly he should be able and wiling to make it stop.
It could certainly be made to stop, but if he were to stop it by forcing us to open ourselves to love, he would no longer be himself nor would we be human, for God is love and we are free; and love must be freely given and freely reciprocated. So for him to simply eradicate our freedom would be for both us and him to cease to exist.
If he were to simply remove from us the consequences of our rejection of his love, that would breed a world of unspeakable horrors, as we, freed from the fulness of love – for love must be free, and acts must have consequences – would then be free to become ever darker and closed to life, joy and peace. We would become petty, spoiled children demanding
our own way without the natural reaping of the fruits of our choices. He would be the indulgent parent sheltering us from reality.
The tertium quid or "third way" is for us to realize our error and turn back to love, not demanding but entreating the one who bears the marks of love, that he would have mercy on us, according to his ever-abounding mercy.
In our desperate state, we are not entitled to rescue and redemption, but like King David of old we can cry out to him, the God of love, for mercy and grace to help in our time of need. And because he, in his divine-human person, bears the marks of love, we can be confident that he will hear us and have mercy on us. Lord, have mercy.
To learn more about St. James Orthodox Church in Taneytown, call them at 443-821-7246, visit them on-line at www.stjamesorthodoxchurch.org, or better yet, join them for Sunday service at 30 York St., Taneytown.
Read other homilies by Father Barkley
About St. James the Apostle Orthodox Church of Taneytown
The Holy Orthodox Church is the Church founded by Jesus Christ and described throughout the New Testament. All other Christian Churches and sects can be traced back historically to it. The word Orthodox literally means "straight teaching" or "straight worship," being derived from two Greek words: orthos, "straight," and doxa, "teaching" or "worship."
As the encroachments of false teaching and division multiplied in early Christian times, threatening to obscure the identity and purity of the Church, the term "Orthodox" quite logically came to be applied to it. The Orthodox Church carefully guards the truth against all error and schism, both to protect its flock and to glorify Christ, whose Body the Church is.
St. James the Apostle Orthodox Church of Taneytown is a congregation of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. We are the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Christian Church whose roots trace directly back to first century Antioch, the city in which the disciples of Jesus Christ were first called "Christians" (Acts 11:26). The
Orthodox Church is the oldest and second largest Christian group in the world. We are called by God our creator to worship and follow Him, and to proclaim to the world His message of love, peace, and salvation.
God loves all mankind and desires that all human beings should believe in Him, know Him, abide in Him, and receive eternal life from Him. To accomplish this, God Himself came into the world as a man, Jesus Christ, becoming man that we might become like God.
The Antiochian Archdiocese, under the leadership of His Eminence Metropolitan Joseph, sees itself on a mission to bring America to the ancient Orthodox Christian Faith. We join our brothers and sisters in the various Orthodox Christian jurisdictions — Greek, Orthodox Church in America, Romanian, Ukrainian, and more — in this endeavor. In less than 20
years the Archdiocese has doubled in size to well over 200 churches and missions throughout the United States and Canada.
